Got to see something? In fact, Magdalena was barely paying attention to what he was saying. The only question was, what will he think of it. Will he think I look like a little tramp… or did Norman have a believable reaction? She looked down at her bosom. Nothing had changed. You could see… everything.
They arrived at Chez Toi and turned the Audi over to the valet. Magdalena said, “This is it? A hedge?”
“This is it,” said Norman. “It’s behind the hedge.” They were just a few steps from a privet hedge that must have been ten or eleven feet high. An enormous privet hedge. The thing had been trimmed meticulously, absolutely evenly, on top. A portal had been cut through it… a rectangle well over seven feet high and four feet wide and at least a yard deep… a rectangle perfect down to the last trimmed tiny privet leaf. Darkness was closing in rapidly, and in the twilight one could easily mistake the hedge for a battlement, a forbidding wall of solid masonry.
“I don’t even see a sign.”
“There aren’t any signs,” said Norman in the tone of somebody who knows these things.
Magdalena’s heart began racing. All over again she thought of something more basic. All over again she was plunged into despair. What if she were completely deceiving herself! What had Sergei said to her last week? Nothing!—not one personal word! Merely the polite, meaningless things proper people are supposed to say when they’re introduced to you. She had built this whole thing up out of looks and smiles and gestures that might or might not have revealed any feeling at all on his part. He had poured his long, searching, insinuating looks into her eyes… three times. But suppose they weren’t searching for anything, and they weren’t insinuating anything? Suppose they were merely long by her clock? Too late to figure it out now! Here she was, and there he was, presumably, somewhere on the other side of that hedge… and she was still aboard an insane flight, diving, soaring, diving, soaring soaring soaring until the next little what-if sends her into a fatal dive and the next faint hope pulls her out of it… and this had been going on every waking moment for seven days—
“But how does anybody know it’s there?” said Magdalena.
“Anybodies don’t know,” said Norman. “It’s open to the public, but it’s like a private club. Unless they know you or someone has put in a word for you, it’s very hard to make a reservation. Having no signs is… you know… part of the aura of the place.”
Magdalena had no idea what an aura was… but this wasn’t the time to ask for definitions. They were right at the improbable portal, a rectangle cut through a three-foot-thick privet hedge with a precision that would cause a mere stonemason to swoon with envy. Two couples were honking away in English with their amusement turned up to the max. Then she and Norman walked through this precisely, prissily clipped formal hedgeway and—there was Chez Toi, Your House, right in front of them. Magdalena knew the restaurant was literally in a house, but her imagination had built a mansion. This was no mansion. That much was obvious even as the darkness closed in. By Miami standards, it was an old, old house, one of the few remaining examples of a style that had been fashionable a hundred years ago, Mediterranean Revival. Almost the entire front yard was now a terrace and a vista of soft candle lights on the tables of people dining outside. There was more candlelight above, in the old-fashioned lamps that hung from the branches of spreading blackthorn trees. The candlelight did wonders for the white faces of the Anglos… who were everywhere… They seemed to occupy every last seat out here. Their voices created a buzz and a babble… none of it raucous.
It was lovely out here, but ¡Dios mío! it was ¡hot!
They found themselves in the entry gallery of what looked like somebody’s old house, comfortable but by no means luxurious… near, but not on, the ocean… and certainly not what Magdalena expected to see in the most eminent of all restaurants in Miami. Straight ahead was a set of stairs, but with no grand curving sweep of banisters and balustrades. On either side was an arched doorway… arched, but with arches no one would remember ten seconds later… and yet out from